Monday, May 23, 2011

Giant Days Redux

I really enjoyed working on this week's Giant Days comics. They were complex to make, more difficult layouts that I had tried before. Most of them are like two of my normal comics in one - the first things I've done that I'd want to print at an A4 size rather than the smaller size that I usually work at.

I had intended to draw them all like the test comics I posted last week, but half way through the second one, I started to feel like I could give them a bit more polish and make them really nice. Below is the first one I did in pencil - and here's the version I actually ran. I like both, but the subsequent pages needed more than I could give them in this rougher style. Difficult to explain!

Incidentally, I came up with the pencil-and-photoshop method as a way of saving time. By the time I'd done a couple of them, I had gobbled up almost all that time filling in lovely ragged looking brick walls. There is also a measure of extra care required when laying out panels. Add in scanning, putting on proper panel borders, and clean-up, and the savings were negligible.

Though working on Giant Days made me want to do a proper, longer, story, returning to Bad Machinery straight away has felt right, straight away. I love the characters and of all my projects , it's the one that feels like it has the most gas in the tank. I hope you'll enjoy The Case Of The Lonely One.

5 comments:

Thanks! It's just levels-adjusted pencils. Actually, it's not even levels-adjusted, I use smart blur to fill any gaps, then colour the whole lot in black. Far from a perfect process but the best I came up with after a lot of levels-based experiments.

John, I am liking your endings a lot more. I feel like all the pieces are in place for runaway success.

As a curmudgeon, I personally prefer Giant Days to Bad Machinery but I can understand the BM would have a larger target demographic. The pensioner population is also trending upward however so you might consider doing a strip for them. Lots of whinging about taxes and the price of boiled sweets. It'd practically write itself.